Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus is the author of two novels, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tell All and Plays Well With Others, and a collection of short stories, White People. His most recent work is a volume of four novellas, The Practical Heart. The title novella in that collection (which also includes Preservation News, He’s One, Too and Saint Monster) won a National Magazine Prize when it appeared in Harper’s magazine. He has taught at Stanford University, Duke University and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and Sarah Lawrence College. Gurganus has won numerous awards and his stories have been anthologized in the current O Henry Prize collection and the Best American Short Stories 2001. His writing is also represented in the Norton Anthology of American Short Fiction. Allan Gurganus was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He lives in North Carolina and is currently at work on his next novel, An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church. This is his second conversation with Robert Birnbaum.

Robert Birnbaum: Tell me about the anti-Jesse-Helms organization
you are a member of?

Allan Gurganus: Writers Against Jesse Helms. I co-founded it in
1990. We were just livid at the thought of his continuing for one more
year and here it is twelve years later. But, nature does have its compensations,
it’s dragging me kicking to the grave, but he’s going sooner than I am.
He’s, I think, lost a little of the vinegar and the rage, but every time
you begin to try to make him warm and fuzzy, he’ll come out with some
statement that is so egregious and so homophobic and so inherently racist
and xenophobic  it’s not even xenophobia, it’s  he just hates people,
it’s not just gay people or black people, it’s just people.

RB: So what happens to the organization now that he is retiring?

AG: I’m afraid we’ll be Writers Against Liddy Dole. That’s the
next step. It looks like she is coming in. In a weird way, Helms is a
much more authentic human being than she is. She’s a privileged kid who
decided, arbitrarily, to run for office. I ran into an old man in Salisbury,
her hometown, who’d seen it all and I said, "Did you know Liddy Dole
coming up?" And he said, "Oh yeah."
"What was her story?"
"She was always running for something."
And she’s never stopped. And never stopped long enough to ask, who am
I and what do I really believe? It’s just like orange are the power suits
and if you can mike me I’ll walk off the podium and amaze everybody. She’s
an Avon lady.

RB: Will she change her hair?

AG: I haven’t keep up, but I’m sure it’s going to be whipping
around. It may be karmic destiny that she was going to announce her candidacy
on Sept. 11 and had to reschedule. Helms at least had a kind of galvanizing
influence on people. You can get money and you can get people excited
and he’s always good copy in the most horrible way. What’s not understood
is that the reason he’s been elected for the last ten years is that people
from New Jersey are retiring in North Carolina and the old tabaccky farmers
are dying off. The Volvo crowd with the silver hair and looking out for
the great grand children’s inheritance are voting in Jesse Helms and have
made that happen. All the vilification of the south is continuing. It’s
pretty hollow now.

RB: There is an Association of Southern Writers?

AG: There is. Sort of like a Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s a horrifying
thought. I went to one meeting in Chattanooga to be inducted. One of the
writers  he hadn’t been inducted yet but he was clearly bucking for
that  came through the buffet line with a rack of venison he had cooked
in the parking lot and basted with thousand island dressing, used wood
chips that he found behind the dumpster. I mean, I thought, "Jesus
god, I don’t think I can take it, you know."

RB: We’re not naming any names?

AG: No. You wouldn’t know him. But it’s sort of the James Dickey
vein, the wild macho man from the woods. There’s one of each. There’s
a genteel lady who is fine until you get that fourth daiquiri into her
and then jump back. It’s a wonderful crowd. It’s a wonderful group of
people.

RB: How old is the organization?

AG: I think it was founded by Robert Penn Warren in the ’40s or
’50s. It’s a very particular society. Sort of like the International Dry
Cleaners Hall of Fame. It’s a very particular and local thing. But some
very wonderful people have belonged. You would be a crazy person not to
be rejoicing everyday not to have been born in the south. The sheer density
of narrative, the sheer capacity for telling amusing stories, not just
by people that are paid to write, but people who are earning a living
in service stations and who amuse themselves…

RB: Would you have said this ten years ago?

AG: I think so.

RB: I mean would you have said this? I don’t think that
the facts have changed. Part of what is driving this question is the reticence
and even the sense of inferiority that I have seen exhibited by some southern
writers. I have rarely heard anyone proudly announce…

AG: If I had been born in Akron, I don’t know what I’d be writing.
I’d probably be writing about the Goodyear dealership and how Daddy got
it away from the second-in-command…I don’t know. But to have grown up…we’ve
talked about this before…to have grown up in a house where four generations
could walk through the door at any moment. You literally hear footfalls.
And you don’t know whether the next person through that door is going
to be black or white or ancient or infantile. Or a neighbor or a bible
salesman or Flannery O’Connor on crutches. You just don’t know who is
coming through the door. And that makes for interest narratively. And
it also gives you that sense, even if your family, like mine is old fashioned
merchant family stock it’s not exactly that we are the Cabots or the Lowells.
We just owned that patch for a long time and paid our club dues and turned
up at church and knew where we were going to be buried. Over enough generations,
that really amounts to something. For a story teller it gives you a tremendous
kind of fossil fuel, a tremendous sense of material and a tremendous kind
of trajectory. It’s not that you are endlessly telling the story of your
own family, but it gives a sense that time is inherently dramatic. That
you have absolute access to the past, including fooling around with it
and pushing and pulling it and shaping it and ignoring it. What I think
America now feels, all of the USA, is something that I grew up feeling
and knowing, which was that history is a daily force. We knew this because
we lived with the burned monuments that Sherman had left behind. And that
the sense that the world is a battle field and is important because people
died here. That is also a tremendous advantage for a writer. Plus the
church is still extremely important. I live between two churches…I’m
such a pagan. I sleep a little deeper when I hear those church bells go
off on Sunday morning and roll over and scratch and do something lascivious,
if possible. It does inform the meter of the language and the King James
Bible is still mother’s milk and I still know every single verse of "Hark
the Herald Angels Sing" and many a hymn. And those play in the work
in a profound way, after a while.

RB: Not to dwell excessively on this matter of regionalism, but
some people say you can’t throw a stone in North Carolina without hitting
a writer. Why is that?

AG: Part of the prosaic answer, apart from the drinking water,
is the schools are really good. The schools have traditionally been very
good. Including the oldest state university in the country and so people
who are talented from farms could go to school for three hundred dollars
a year. Now the kids who didn’t get into Princeton want to go to Chapel
Hill because it’s a gorgeous campus and still a fairly good school. It’s
not the Deep South. Deep South is like deep trouble. We are all living
with moderate amounts of huge trouble but it’s like the racial question…has
always had sane people saying, "Let’s think about this and let’s
make a citizens’ committee and let’s talk it out"…as opposed to
absolute retrenchment. This is the way it’s been done…I was just in
Mississippi and they sent a black driver  a Denzel Washington type,
very distinguished  with a black Lincoln and I was in the back seat
and actually went to sleep. And I woke up as every time he was about to
pass a car, this battered old van would just pull out and block his path
with out signaling. Like in the Wild West, just trying to run him off
the road. And I said, "What is going on?" He said. "This
has happened for forty minutes." I sat up and the windows were kind
of smoky and as soon as we passed this van,  there was this red neck
white guy from Louisiana, kind of Cajun with a goatee, looking like he
was missing teeth and 40 IQ points  but when he saw me in the back seat,
he gave this big grin because suddenly it was not this successful black
man with a Ph.D., it was just a chauffeur. Then he could let us go because
it was okay. This happened last week. We are not talking 1938 here. I
was scared and my impulse was to sit in the front seat with the driver.

RB: This is an ambitious tour for you, isn’t it?

AG: Yeah, all over the place. I am all over the map  my subject
matter starts in the south  and then gets out. I get to get out too,
periodically. It’s not wine that can’t travel far from the vineyard. I
hope. Because it’s in many languages and you want to tell stories that
matter to as many people as possible. In language that’s…the language
matters immensely to me. Nobody ever talks about language anymore. People
talk about gold records and nobody talks about music anymore.

RB: This book was to be published last winter, why wasn’t it?

AG: I was working on the last novella, Saint Monster.

RB: And it didn’t come out easily?

AG: They very rarely do. What that involves for me is cutting
and convincing myself that everything I need is there already. The kid
goes away to boarding school after the death of his father and I had a
whole novella length passage at the boarding school. Which was wonderful
stuff…

RB: As long as you brought it up  elsewhere you quote Peter
Taylor’s definition of a novella  can you be more specific about what
a novella is? Why isn’t Saint Monster a novel?

AG: It’s a big novella. A writer friend of mine was talking about
 in a school to eight year olds, about a novella and a girl raised her
hand and said, "M’am, is a novella a novel written by a girl?"
Randell Jarrell’s definition of a novella is a work of a certain length
with something wrong with it. Taylor says, "It’s a work you can pick
up at dinner time after you have washed the dishes and finish just as
you go to bed." At least three of these four, that’s true of. I intended
all of them to be read the way you eat a plate of oysters. All at once.
It should be that kind of single sitting…a completely satisfying
experience.

RB: That seems more about the reading than the writing.

AG: It’s very much written to be read and very much written to
be read aloud and all at once. You do that by cutting out the secondary
characters and the subplots. What I really love as a reader is just to
feel that sense of obsessive investigation that builds and culminates
and really illuminates. I don’t just want to do ABC, I want to do ADJZBC1.
That’s why it takes me much longer to write a book than some of my colleagues,
who pop out one a year. I feel that I am growing as a writer. I’m 54 and
I feel I have really just gotten started. That’s a very exciting sensation.

RB: I have to ask. Perhaps, I didn’t read Saint Monster
carefully enough, but I couldn’t decide Clyde Sr.’s race. All the evidence
points to him being black but the mother/wife says no…

AG: The mother of the narrator never really knew. She assumed
he was white but didn’t really care. She thought he was amusing and adored
her and he was sexy and it was fun while it lasted.

RB: She was a very smart woman.

AG: She’s very smart. And I think to the naked eye the thing that
was most arresting about him was not his skin tone but his extraordinary
ugliness. As is said in the book, he’s like a basset hound he’s so ugly
he’s cute. He played on it and it became a kind of distraction. I think
the way that O.J. Simpson thinks he didn’t cut his wife’s head off, that
we are all capable of convincing ourselves of anything we want. All four
of the novellas are very much about people who have found an obsession
that organizes life for them and who then wind up sacrificing life to
protect the obsession they commence to protect them from life. Which is
an allegory for what art does, in a way. It shields us and it sometimes
cuts us off. But it’s a kind of magic that we all require and I really
respect the people who don’t always turn to organized religion or country
club membership or all the conventional routes to security and peace.
People who make up their own system seem to me the ones that are most
admirable. I really want to believe whatever mythology I put together
for myself aesthetically, ethically and personally will see me through
to my death. If it can’t do that, then I’ve been barking up the wrong tree
all along.

RB: Can’t carry you through to your death?

AG: I want it to see me through. My vision of what comes once
your eyes are closed is pretty dark, I think. It’s how you get there I
guess.

RB: You’ve written enough to be leaving a trail…

AG: It is a trail and for me that is a huge part of why I do this.
I am a huge immortality queen from way back. If somebody came and said,
"Allan, you are a sweetheart, but I have the card catalogue from the
Library of Congress for the year 2045 and your ass ain’t in there."…
That’s very important to me. To already be in the Norton Anthology
of American Literature is huge for me.

RB: Aren’t you in some O Henry and some Best American
Short Story collections?

AG: Oh yeah and that’s a great pleasure. But that’s the reason
we do this. It’s not just to…

RB: ‘We’?

AG: Why all of us do our work. Yeah, ‘we’ is dangerous. Mark Twain
was always furious that Walt Whitman kept referring to we, we, we. He
said, "I assume Mr. Whitman means himself and his tapeworm?"
I’ll back off into the first person and say why I do this. Because it’s
like a great thank you note at the end of your life if you can leave something
behind or a house gift or a love song. That says this is the best I can
figure out, this made sense at the time. I’ll take my chance in the Great
Lottery and hope that this will pertain for people a hundred years from
now. I look back on things I published in the 70’s and that 30 years ago
and there are no name brands that date the piece. I was a kid but I knew…

RB: What’s Bret Ellis going to do?

AG: I know, it’s rough. But that’s the goal, to build something
autonomous and will fly.

RB: You reread your work?

AG: I have looked at but I have a hard time rereading a lot of
it. I think it’s a mistake. It’s like looking at your photographs when
you were 25. You think, "Who was this baby?" The beauty of what
I do is precisely that 25 year olds can’t do it. You have to have buried
scores and scores of people.

RB: You managed to use that Jonathan Swift quote, "No wise
man wants to be younger." What a gem!

AG: My two favorite ages have been ten and fifty. They are weirdly
alike. Ten, you are sort of smart as an adolescent, but you don’t have
all the below-the-belt complications that are coming and the catapulting
into sexuality and all that hugely volcanic stuff that’s gonna happen
to you. You still got some kind of rational sense, but you are also extremely
playful and as smart as you are going to be as an adult. And a 50, you’re
sort of 35  at least this is true of me, I’ve always had a lot of
physical stamina  so I can do whatever I could do when I was younger.
But I also have this long view. It’s like Moses looking into the Promised
Land. And the Promised Land for those of us who are 50 is hoping to escape
too many debilitating diseases that are up ahead. But what comes with
it is a tremendous sense that moment is what you are really aspiring to.
It’s not some grand future. If only I could XYZ. Well, here we are at
this table with this room with this sunlight streaming through these windows.
This is it. I had the horrible experience of losing an incredibly brilliant
student at the World Trade Center, who was working as a temp. A hideous
phrase. For one week. And had called everybody to say, "Look at the
views and here I am." He was getting a huge kick out of being a spy
in this world. When the first tower was hit he was describing it in real
time, on the computer, to friends. And suddenly, it stopped, because he
was on the 102nd floor… I thought, how beautiful to spend the last second
of your life describing something amazing and magnificent. He probably
literally did not know what hit him. He has a book coming out next year.
At least he saved some of it. Everybody right now is living in a state
of grace  a state of "this is what I do have as opposed to
this is what we’ve lost." This sense of intrusion and empire undoing…

RB: You are saying that people are exhibiting a sense of appreciation?

AG: I was in New York and I have never seen people in New York
looking each other in the eye and holding the subway door. I mean it only
lasted two weeks, but my God that’s an eternity in New York. I once saw
a traffic accident, a young mother with a kid in the front seat and her
car just spun six or eight times and then came to a halt. And the police
were running over to her and she was totally intent on going over her
baby  her three-year old  just working every joint to see
if he was all right. And when he was, she was just hysterical …she was
holding, hugging him, laughing, just rejoicing and it was extremely beautiful.
It was not disturbing. It was totally recognizable and I’m sure it lasted
her for weeks or months or years, I hope. I have that sense about my life
and my friend. Having this book come out, it couldn’t be appearing at
a worst time. 150 friends had a party and I thought…

RB: Why is this the worst time for a book?

AG:
Everybody is looking only at CNN and talking about international affairs.
But you never know, you throw your bread on the water. Conrad said, "Every
book, like every man, has a fate." Even as the person who wrote the
book and is doing his best to make it known, I know like a mother of twelve
that they’ll get there in their own way.

RB: It’s too bad that there is this urgency to maximize sales
at the time of publication as if books were like movies or records…

AG: The commercial fact is that they are only in the stores for
six weeks now. And that’s why they send me from pillar to post to talk
about it.

RB: Let’s talk a little bit about the book. What determined the
order of the novellas?

AG: It’s intuitive. You sit there with them like pieces of broken
glass in a stained-glass window and you hold them up side by side. I wanted
it to be a kind of announcement of the theme and variation. All about
history wished and history lived. And that’s extremely apropos
for this moment. I wanted a woman to be in one and man in the other. It’s
like arranging a dinner party. I wanted the most recent and the longest
and the best to be at the end…

RB: When you wrote Plays Well With Others was it the best
thing you wrote to date?

AG: It was a very important piece for me.

RB: What would it mean to say the ‘best’?

AG: It’s just what you feel most fervently for in a group of four
pieces. And you tend to love the one you just delivered, the most. This
book is my most formally perfect piece of work. I can’t do better. There
is not a sentence in the book, if it were read to me, I couldn’t tell
you what it had been before, what I changed it to and why I made it this
way.

AG: Oh no, oh no. The only problem with reading is that these
things are seventy pages long and your audience will not put up with that,
so you have to cut it down. Even that is a kind of discipline. You realize
that you know the material so well that you know which six moving parts
have to be there in order to make the seventh work. So it’s like breaking
down an organism that you can unravel in your sleep. You get to know the
work in a whole different way, like a surgeon operating on his beloved.
It’s the ultimate intimacy, in a way. To make a shape and have to change
it. To read it aloud is the great payoff and in a room of 20 or 30 or
150 people to make the language return to sound waves and to think musically
is a great pleasure.

RB: Do you read out loud when you are writing?

AG: I do, I read aloud a lot. It’s a great organizing principle.
More writers should do it. And if they did, American prose would be a
lot better than it is. Most American books are made with about as much
care as most American Happy Meals are. There’s a lot of Styrofoam. There’s
a lot of corn starch. If you read it aloud you are at least responsible
for those sound waves in your own ear, and that’s a purifying exercise.

RB: When you started to write, did you have it in mind to do four
novellas?

AG: I don’t even have it in mind that I’m going to do a collection
of novellas. What I do is, I get up in the morning and I write the way
a bird sings. The bird doesn’t say, "Just think, there’ll be the
collected hits." They just twitter, twitter, twitter and some of
the twitters are better than others and you get clusters and you see how
this is related to that and then you have the twitter symphony. It comes
out in a way, like yard goods, you mete it out. It’s a very intuitive
and extremely inefficient process, this business of writing fiction the
way I write it.

RB: Not on demand?

AG: Out of necessity. Out of necessity. The ‘for hire’ part is
pretty provisional. It’s seasonal work. It comes and goes and I have been
very well paid for books and I have also given books away. The great privilege
is to be able to get up every morning and do it. How many doctors would
go unpaid just for the privilege of being in the examination room with
patients everyday? That’s what most American writers are doing, they are
not writing for money, they are writing because writing is a clarifying
experience. It’s a second form of dreaming. It’s a cultural intuition.
It’s a way of having the world make brief sense for yourself. It’s very
hard to give up. If somebody came and told me, "You’ll never earn
another penny from doing this and you’ve got to find three day jobs,"
I would not be able to stop. I have a lap-top on the airplane, as I am
on this tour. It’s not that I am writing a great masterpiece, it’s like
a bread maker, I just have to have my hands in the yeast.

RB: Very few writers write on the road. Walter Mosley does…

AG: When you are up in that airplane…if the pilot said, "Allan,
I need your help in the cockpit because we are way off course." I
would not be able to help him. So I might as well sit there poking letters
into space trying to make sense of things. I’m far from phones, far from
any kind of real responsibility. It’s like being in a play-pen, in a way.
It’s a pleasure.

RB: Maybe it could be an opportunity to do basic research, soaking
in the conversations and people’s mannerisms…

AG: I’m always observing. Flying over New York today  it’s the
first time I’ve seen it since the event. A row of teeth with a molar missing…

RB: What was this book going to be after you wrote the first novella?

AG: I really thought only of the validity of story I was telling.
I didn’t think, "Gee, this is a novella." It was a necessary
length for one piece. Then I had three of those and I thought, "Wouldn’t
a fourth one be wonderful?" And I had one in the works. I have six
novellas nearly done. I’m always working on many, many things at once.
Saint Monster was a short story I have had in progress for about
twelve or fifteen years. I remember transferring from type script to the
computer. Every six months I’d get out the first thirty pages about giving
Gideon Bibles out in North Carolina in the ’50s, going to those funky
old motor courts and think, "This is lovely stuff but I have no idea
where this is going. This is lyrical, but it’s not enough to be lyrical."
One day, I got it out about ten years in, and there was a traffic accident
and the kid looks over at his father, who is this ugly and utterly beguiling
and charming sweet man and the kid realized his father is black. In the
bash of adrenaline, in the course of the accident, he sees his father
as other people have seen him. And he realized that this can’t really
be his genetic father. Or can it? Because this man is black and he’s platinum
blonde and suddenly this was the thing that I had been looking for in
the story. I had to dig and dig and dig. And literally create entrapment
situations so I could tell myself the real history of the story. Then
I was really on to the scent. It’s like being a detective in reverse.
You are not finding clues, you are planting clues. But you are planting
them, to find them. It’s very, very circular and very inefficient. By
the time you finish with these people you know them in a DNA inside-out
way. And you exactly know how they would say everything. They are phantoms.
It’s not autobiographical. John Cheever used to say, "Fiction is
a force of memory misunderstood." Genuinely  when it’s working
 when you are in the zone, it is truly like remembering something
14 times as vivid as anything you have ever lived. It’s given to you.
All you have to do as a good secretary is just transcribe it and get it
down and polish it.

RB: Are you in a trance?

AG: Not all the time. But that’s why you do the drudge work, you
do the preparation.

RB: Meaning, rewriting?

AG: Endless rewriting, cutting out adverbs and shortening sentences.

RB: What’s your relationship with your editor?

AG:
My editor is very respectful of what it is that I do. He makes marks on
the manuscript that I sometimes gratefully accept and sometimes 
more often  say, "I see why that makes good grammatical sense,
but the fact is I’m 54 years old. This the way I write. If you want to
hear Diana Ross don’t go out and buy a Leslie Gore album. This is the
way I sing." A certain kind of piling up of detail, a certain visual
gluttony is a part of my style and part of what people read me for. It’s
too late to retool.

RB: Have you had the same editor?

AG: Elizabeth Sifton did the first two books. Dan Frank did Plays
Well With Others and Gary Fisketjon is the editor of this book. They
are all good in different ways.

RB:Richard Ford has said he would stop writing if Fisketjon stopped
editing.

AG: Gary and Richard have an almost fraternal connection. That’s
the ultimate. I have that with very close friends who have read my work
for thirty years and whose work I read. It means when they send you something,
you drop everything and read it they day you get it. Even canceling appointments
and across time zones because you know that six weeks waiting for an answer
is like six weeks leaving the fetus on the side of the road.

RB: A few years ago there was a rash of stories of national magazines
having ‘issues’ with stories having gay content. David Leavitt and Esquire
comes to mind. In one of the novellas you have an episode where the character
submits a story about a gay sailor in Viet Nam. You also had a problem
…

AG: Yeah, yeah Esquire. First they asked me for a story.
This was a story was working on. I was in Viet Nam on an aircraft carrier.
We’ve all heard so many Viet Nam stories about straight guys from the
Midwest and Asian girls and blah blah blah. But to be gay on an aircraft
carrier off Viet Nam, I haven’t read that much. It was a fascinating perspective
on this alien world of being an alien under the disguise of colonialism,
trying to police other aliens. It was a really smarmy role. When I proposed
this to the then-editor, he said, "You’re really going to rub our
noses in it. I thought you were a pro." As I said in the book it’s
like saying to Toni Morrison, "Oh you are writing about black people.
You’re really gonna make us pay, bitch." Nobody would say that to
her. Every minority group thinks it’s the most abused at the moment. I
do think to be gay in this culture is the last opportunity when you get
up and leave the room to imagine what quips are made. There’s a line,
"You know what a faggot is? A faggot is a distinguished bachelor
friend of the family who has just left the room." Just when you think
things are getting better you find yourself as a character in some trashy
book by what you thought was a friend. And you’ve got bleach blond hair
and a drop earring and you are saying to all the women at your parties,
"I hate you, you are too good looking. I want to be the best looking
belle at all my parties." All these vampy campy trashy 1956 cliches
about being gay, thrown at you by somebody who is your neighbor and friend.
I just think are we never going to make any progress. Forget Bin Laden,
we have so much to straighten out. To make monsters of other people is
just more work than I can bear. I hate to be the brunt of that. I like
to have the right to blow the whistle on it when I see it.

RB: I’m not clear. Are you hopeful or not?

AG: There’s been a lot of progress. Gay people have just as much
right to be idiotic consumers as straight people. Î’ve thought a
lot lately about that George Bernard Shaw quote, "Patriotism is the
last refuge of scoundrels."

RB: I think that is an Oscar Wilde quote.

AG: It doesn’t matter [The quote is by Samuel Johnson]. When all
else fails you see these guys by the side of the road with their little
flags…it’s a lot more complicated than that; it’s both grander and
simpler at the same time.

RB: Where do you live?

AG: I’m in Hillsboro, North Carolina. There are a lot of flags
on everything. But it’s a very, very sweet peaceful community. I’m very
involved in town politics trying to keep the Wal-mart out.

RB: You are also a gardener…

AG: Yeah, I had to take half my garden out from under my fingernails
when I came to Yankee land. It’s extremely calming and daunting in that
you are up against all of nature and all your best-laid plans work and
don’t work. The great moments, I had a moment three years ago…it’s
one of most completely satisfying things that’s happened to me, I have
three younger brothers, they are all gardeners. My mother was a passionate
gardener. It’s just genetic. They all grow something. One brother brought
me red cabbage, which you distribute in the winter…by the time spring
came I had these big beautiful beet red cabbages with mammoth frilly leaves.
I had a clump of white Siberian irises, that come up with almost pencil
sharp buds and come up very fast. These big floppy almost umbrella sized
red leaves were perforated by white blossoms that came up and penetrated
them and then bloomed through. I can’t even explain to you, how mysterious
and beautiful it was. It’s like being a writer, you surrender to the serendipitous,
you enjoy it and use it.

RB: Looking forward into the next few years, what’s coming from
you?

AG: My next novel is going to be a big, big book like Widow.
That is a daunting exercise. A hundred year’s history of a little church
that ends in bankruptcy as a television ministry. I’m doing more and more
essays and op-ed pieces. Finding that’s extremely useful for me and for
other people. One of the privileges of being a writer-citizen is that
since all of us are really thinking the same thing at the same time, if
you can get it down you have provided a huge service for other people.
Just the way all the people of my generation came of age in the 1950’s
had the same parents. Because history had put our mothers and fathers
in a particular vice between the Depression and the Second War. They were
the most similar generation that, I think, ever lived in human history.
Forget the ’60s, these people were maimed by history, clipped. I found
that if I write honestly about my parents the emotional limitations and
the emotional hunger that existed between my generation and my parents
 that the resonance is so immense for other people  they are
always saying, "How did you know my father?" Well, it’s because
I knew mine. I’d like to think one of the benefits of the September 11th
conflagration is that barriers between public and private life have been
lowered for-ever. And this can make for an easier elision between public
and private thinking for writers and for regular people. And a larger,
honest political discourse is possible so that literature is not just
the purview of a couple of aesthetic sensibilities but anything is permissible.